In reply to the posting by Harold Bush, I'd like 
to point out that the beginning of MT's 
friendship with Hay is discussed in the MTP 
edition of  Roughing It, pp. 828-30.

Mr. Bush expressed uncertainty about where he had 
previously seen the passage from the piece "John 
Hay," which was one of the dictations that MT 
made in Florence in 1904 and selected as part of 
his final version of the autobiography. The 
complete text of this dictation was published in 
Paine's 1924 edition. The version in the North 
American Review, however, omits a long passage in 
the middle about Hay and Horace Greeley, and 
three paragraphs at the end, where MT makes some 
interesting remarks about writing as opposed to 
dictation. The omitted section begins "Within the 
last eight or ten years I have made several 
attempts to do the autobiography in one way or 
another with a pen, but the result was not 
satisfactory" (p. 224 of the MTP edition).

The new critical edition provides background 
information about the history of the text. The 
online textual apparatus (at 
marktwainproject.org) makes note of what was 
omitted from the NAR chapter (where it was paired 
with excerpts from two April 1906 dictations 
about MT's brother Orion). The textual commentary 
explains that when preparing the text for the 
magazine, MT wrote on the original typescript, 
"Of this instalment I have struck out more than 3 
pages. Mark." Every revision that he made in the 
text is listed. In addition, the list of variants 
shows that a phrase in the typescript 
text--"instead of an ungrateful one" 
(224.17)--was omitted from the NAR proofs, and 
the same sentence was cut further before 
publication: the phrase "and would be President 
next year if we were a properly honest and 
grateful nation" (224.16–17) is not found at all 
in the NAR. The source of these revisions, which 
are not on any extant document, was probably 
someone at the NAR. Clemens himself made no 
revisions on this portion of the proofs.

Harriet Smith